Today’s Literacy Headlines

Officials in Georgia’s fourth-largest district are hoping an infusion of federal relief funds will change all that. Fulton County Schools has allocated roughly a third of its $262 million in pandemic aid to replace a patchy and uneven approach to reading with a solid, phonics-based curriculum. The initiative, which includes training teachers and administrators in how children learn to read and adding K-2 literacy coaches in all 60 elementary schools, is an attempt to give students an equal shot at staying on grade level, regardless of where they live.

Want to help students improve their oral communication skills? Start with listening. When thinking of speaking skills, we forget how powerful our listening skills need to be, and that they precede speaking ability. Listening while someone is speaking is key. It models patterns, intonation, prosody, accents, word order, co-locations, and conversational animation. It’s also a vehicle for acquiring information, and preparing to continue a conversation, whether with more information or questioning. Pointing out all of these concepts explicitly to students, regardless of language proficiency, will heighten metacognition and awareness of how language works.

A new collection of books was recently released, one designed for elementary school classrooms. Each bundle in this new Rising Voices series, while differing somewhat depending on grade level, contains books created by Latino authors and illustrators. Maria Armstrong, executive director of the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents, says that book publisher Scholastic pitched her on the idea for Rising Voices and invited her to be a mentor for the project’s development.

Sharing stories rooted in real events and experiences is a great way to encourage literacy and critical thinking in young readers.

A generation after the influential report, Margaret Spellings, Chester E. Finn and Morgan Polikoff reflect on the past 4 decades of school progress.

The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s release of a report titled “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was a pivotal point in the history of American education. The report used dire language, lamenting that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” As a scholar of education who specializes in standards-based reform and accountability, I believe important lessons can be learned about American education by examining what has taken place since the release of the report. Here are three.

When someone hears a concept or a person’s name for the first time, the most common way of learning this new word is to repeat it out loud. However, previous studies have found contradictory effects of this almost-simultaneous production on our capacity to learn new words. A new study, carried out by Spain’s Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language (BCBL), found that when learning new vocabulary repeating the words can have negative effects on learning, particularly when the repetition is immediate. Silently listening to the word or pausing between hearing and producing the word can be more effective ways to learn it.

This past December I got to fulfill a lifelong dream (well, a dream I’d had for a few years, anyway) of cohosting the annual Undies Awards with Travis Jonker and Carter Higgins. The Undies encourages readers of all ages to peel dust jackets off books and nominate which printed hardcovers—aka hardcases, case covers, or casewraps—have the best designs. Recognizing that this stellar form of secondary storytelling wasn’t just limited to casewraps, Travis, Carter, and I also launched the inaugural Endies Awards in 2022 to celebrate all the inventive endpapers illustrators are creating.

This month marks 20 years since Mo Willems published his first picture book, “Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus!” It has sold more than 6 million copies and received a Caldecott honor. But this past weekend, readers got to see and hear a brand-new side of the bossy bird. As NPR’s Isabella Gomez Sarmiento reports, The Pigeon made his operatic debut at Washington’s Kennedy Center. Willems and Renee Fleming presented the pigeon’s story.

Many children’s authors create animal and plant characters who talk and think like humans. But if the author’s understanding of other species is superficial, the characters’ nonhuman features become little more than a means to deliver jokes. The authors of “The Eyes & the Impossible” and “Big Tree” have avoided this pitfall and created characters who, although they speak with a human tongue, embody the strange magic of other beings.

“Knowledge-building” has become a buzzword in reading instruction. It refers to English/language arts approaches that aim to systematically build students’ understanding of the world—rather than focusing solely or mainly on comprehension skills and strategies. Studies suggest that this approach can be effective at improving students’ reading ability. In a recent Education Week webinar, two researchers who study the role of content learning in reading comprehension talked about what this body of evidence says, and how schools can use the findings to inform the way they teach early reading.

For advocates of building children’s general knowledge, the new long-term study of a knowledge-rich curriculum is certainly positive news and an indication that this type of instruction may be beneficial. But from my perspective, it falls far short of convincing proof or vindication. For starters, the study took place at nine charter schools in Colorado, stretching from Denver to Fort Collins. It’s impossible from the study design to distinguish whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made the difference or if it could be attributed to other things that these charter schools were doing, such as teacher training or character education programs.

After decades of steadily disappointing scores in reading proficiency, the state turned to legislation to bar programs and practices rooted in whole language. Now, all across the state, educators are talking about how the brain learns to read and how to teach in simpatico with that science. Time will tell if it moves the needle – after all, there’s a long implementation journey ahead. But amid national criticism over the use of legislation to guide literacy instruction, many North Carolina education leaders and teachers say things already look and feel different.

As your child gets older, he’ll increasingly be expected to teach himself. High school seniors must read difficult books independently, commit information to memory, schedule their work, cope with test anxiety and much more. These demands build slowly across the grades, essentially forming a second, unnoticed curriculum: learning how to learn independently. For most American students, that curriculum goes untaught.

Listening is a key language skill and academic habit—it’s estimated people spend 45 percent of their communication time listening versus only 30 percent talking—yet students often get little explicit instruction on how to pay attention to each other. As schools work to help students recover academic habits that were disrupted during the pandemic, experts have called for more deliberate practice of listening and other communication skills. One new study suggests quick ways that teaching students to listen to their peers can build deeper academic discussions and counter racial and gender stereotypes in classes like math.

Michael missed most of first grade, the foundational year for learning to read. It was the first fall of the pandemic, and for months Atlanta only offered school online. Michael’s mom had just had a baby, and there was no quiet place to study in their small apartment. He missed a good part of second grade, too. So, like most of his classmates at his Atlanta school, he isn’t reading at the level expected for a third grader. And that poses an urgent problem. Third grade is the last chance for Michael’s class to master reading with help from teachers before they face more rigorous expectations.

During Autism Acceptance Month, transit systems in New York and other major cities are giving children with autism — many of whom are fascinated by trains — the opportunity to record the station announcements that riders hear.

STEM-based education is important for all learners, providing rich opportunities for developing 21st-century skills; it is focused on hands-on learning with real-world applications through a cross-curricular lens, meaning that students learn science and math while also developing creativity, collaboration and communication skills, executive functioning, and flexibility—skills that are transferable to every professional context. Yet it’s impossible to promote scientific literacy without also considering accessible reading and writing instruction.

These works of poetry will inspire children to fight climate change, prepare them for a new sibling, teach them to be courageous and compassionate, and make them think as well as laugh.

A growing group of experts and educators are trying to figure out what the relationship should be between digital technology and reading instruction. Both reading and digital tech are world-expanding human inventions, and laptops and smartphones have arguably given humans unending opportunities to read more; you can access pretty much anything in print within a few seconds. In terms of “raw words,” the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham has said, kids read more now than they did a decade ago. But many reading experts suspect that the technology may also be changing how they read—that reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on the page.

On the 20th anniversary of ‘Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!,’ Willems reflects on his beleaguered bird, bad ideas, and being part of a community of picture-book authors in Western Mass. His books deal with big feelings — frustration, anxiety, disappointment — that are baked into simple stories. But he often stresses that “simple and easy are opposites,” said Tracey Keevan, his editor for over a decade, noting that behind the books is “a tremendous amount of thinking.”

In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine some of the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. Today’s topic is “evidence-based practice.” Jal says, “I like the idea of evidence-informed practice. That centers the notion that there is some evidence that educators should take into consideration but also the reality that there is much about any given situation that is context-specific and depends on the expertise of the local practitioner.”

Are we doing elementary students a disservice by focusing on skills and strategies over background knowledge when we teach reading? Natalie Wexler shares a study that gives evidence that prior knowledge is more important than general skill in reading comprehension, and she makes the case that this is one of the roots of the achievement gap.

A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country. The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read. Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.

Read and evaluated by each member of the NCTE Excellence in Children’s Poetry Award Committee, these titles are notable for their use of language, poetic devices, and application to children ages three to thirteen. The form or structure of the poems was evaluated to ensure that the mood and subject matter were accurately represented. This year’s picks include a range of formats—lively nonfiction, reflective verse, and moving verse novels—written by familiar poets and debut authors.

NPR’s Miles Parks talks with Traci Sorell and Arigon Starr about their children’s book “Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series.” OK, picture this. It’s 1911. You’re at the World Series. The Philadelphia Athletics and the New York Giants are dueling it out for the title. It ends with the Philly A’s winning a thrilling six-game series.

Surrounded by almond groves in the rural town of Winton, about 10 miles northwest of Merced in California’s Central Valley, Frank Sparkes Elementary serves mostly low-income Latino students, and more than half are English learners. That’s not unlike many schools in California. More than 1 in 3 children enter school in California not yet proficient in English. But Frank Sparkes Elementary stands apart from other schools and offers a model of what is possible. Fifty-four percent of English learners at this school are reading and writing at grade level by third grade, according to their scores on Smarter Balanced, the state’s standardized test. That’s more than four times the average in California – only 12.5% of English learners in third grade statewide met or exceeded the standard in English language arts in 2022.

Low statewide reading scores have sparked many advocates to call for California to adopt a so-called structured literacy curriculum that emphasizes phonics and follows the science of reading. English learner advocates have raised concerns that districts may focus too much on phonics and other foundational skills and ignore other important skills that English learners need. So what does the research say about what English learners need when learning to read? Tim Shanahan, chair of the National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth is known for helping to lead the National Reading Panel and co-editor of “Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners,” answers questions.

A remarkable long-term study by University of Virginia researchers led by David Grissmer demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge sequence. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension. And we might be further along in raising reading achievement, closing achievement gaps, and broadly improving education outcomes if we’d been listening to him for the last few decades.

My Powerful Hair is Indigenous author Carole Lindstrom’s new children’s book. It is inspired by her grandmother, who was forced to cut off her hair to try to remove her from Native culture. Lindstrom is the author of the award-winning book, We Are Water Protectors.

A substantial amount of time and energy is currently being spent on the so-called “reading wars,” with efforts to pit “science of reading” advocates against those labeled as “whole language” proponents. How might a teacher navigate this situation? Here’s a response from teacher Christie Nold. He says, “As always, it will be important to lead from a place of support and guidance that brings needed resources into our schools. It will not be enough to remove practices; instead, we need to equip educators with the tools to continue to grow in their craft.”

More school districts are interested in using reading programs designed to build students’ broad knowledge about the world by focusing their reading and writing on specific topics in social studies, science, and the arts. Now, a new study of one of these approaches has shown strongly positive results for students’ reading comprehension. The program is the Core Knowledge Sequence, a set of guidelines for the content and skills that students should learn in pre-K-8. Developed by the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, the approach is based on the work of education researcher E.D. Hirsch, who has argued for decades that students’ reading comprehension hinges on wide-ranging background knowledge—a shared “cultural literacy.”

April is here, and so is Autism Acceptance Month! This month, which includes World Autism Day (April 2 of every year), is a time for uplifting autistic voices and sharing in the community’s joy. But for Samantha Edwards, an autistic content creator and neurodivergent life coach, the month also signifies an influx of harmful myths about autistic people. “April is a wonderful month to crack down on that and listen to autistic voices and their stories and listen to their struggles,” she says. “Acceptance, at the end of the day, is going to promote more inclusivity.”

Character-switching stories can nurture imaginative play, teach early learners empathy, and foster social and emotional learning. Picture books that propose to answer the question “What might happen if you really switched places with someone else?” encourage children to imagine, predict, and reflect on the benefits and challenges of such an occurrence. Teachers can utilize a T-Chart graphic organizer to help students identify and document the benefits and challenges of characters who trade places with another character.

Building students’ general knowledge can lead to dramatic long-term improvements in reading comprehension, a new study suggests—casting serious doubt on standard teaching approaches. A rigorous study involving more than 2,000 students has found that children who got a content-rich, knowledge-building curriculum for at least four years, beginning in kindergarten, significantly outperformed their peers on standardized reading comprehension tests. Students from low-income families made such dramatic gains that their performance on state tests equaled that of children from higher-income families.

During April—Autism Acceptance Month—I hope you take a moment to step back and listen to the youth and adults who are part of a movement to change the way we refer to them, using identity-first language, as the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network encourages. Just as the Deaf community doesn’t want to be called people with hearing impairments since they see the value of Deaf culture, so, too, do the autistics in the world have a right to a cultural voice. Some neurodiverent people prefer different terminology than what many educators are used to.

When social and emotional learning is integrated into language arts, elementary students gain a deeper understanding of concepts like empathy and self-awareness. And they’re more engaged in reading and writing, to boot.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew talks to Big Tree author Brian Selznick about trees, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and how he made a hopeful children’s book about our environmental crisis.

Melissa Knapp is Harpeth Valley Elementary School’s only literacy coach. It’s her job to guide teachers on how to help struggling readers at the 600-student school. She’s always busy, but this year, Knapp is fielding more questions than usual. Only a few months remain before Tennessee third-grade students take a state reading test — students who don’t pass could be held back a year. The retention policy is part of a state law passed in 2021 that was meant to boost long-lagging reading scores and stem pandemic learning losses.

The American school system has long been unequal — both in the depth of the need and resources to meet it. But while the pandemic affected all schools in profound ways, research shows it did more damage to those that were already the most vulnerable, with the recovery harder and slower. For students who were learning from home, especially those in low-income families, the challenges were acute. Many lacked reliable internet, a quiet place to study and a parent on-site to make sure they paid attention. “We turned off schools and inequality grew a lot,” said Tom Kane, faculty director for the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, who helped create the Education Recovery Scorecard, a project of Harvard and Stanford universities.

As the state prepares to roll out universal preschool, a new taxpayer-funded program starting in the next school year that offers preschool hours for free to all 4-year-olds and some younger children, officials have given priority to children who don’t speak English at home. The state will offer those children more hours of tuition-free preschool and is promising — for the first time — that programs will need to use teaching strategies proven to help multilingual learners. Big questions still remain about whether enough is being done to get the word out, what programming will look like, and what help providers will get to improve their offerings.

In a push to get parents to enroll their children in summer school this year, a group of national education organizations is taking to the streets of six major cities to dispel widespread misconceptions that their children are doing OK in school. The advertising campaign will target the six cities—Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, Sacramento County in California, and Washington, D.C.—with displays of side-by-side data showing the percentage of students proficient in math or English in that city and the percentage of parents who think their child is at or above grade level in that subject.

Google is making it easier for people with reading challenges, such as dyslexia, to be able to make out articles and text posts online. The tech giant has launched “reader mode” for Chrome, which takes a site’s primary content and puts it into the sidebar to reduce clutter and distractions. Users will also be able to change the text’s typeface, font size and spacing, as well as its color and background color, to find the combination that works best for them.

What do the educators whose job it is to teach children how to read think about screening for reading delays in the early grades? We asked Doug Rich. He’s a 27-year veteran educator, former classroom teacher of grades 1 through 4, and a current math and reading interventionist at McKinley Elementary School in the San Francisco Unified School District, where he works with “Tier 2” students (those identified as at risk for delays). He’s also a father of two sons with dyslexia. Rich shared his professional journey in teaching literacy—how he came to learn about the disorder, his adoption of simple screeners to identify reading delays in students, and his structured and individualized approach to teaching students how to read.

In “The Manifestor Prophecy,” 12-year-old Nic Blake draws supernatural strength from her “Remarkable” African American forebears. Nic Blake, the heroine of Angie Thomas’s debut middle grade novel, and her dad are Manifestors: highly revered master wizards in a secret league of gifted people called the Remarkables. One of the things that makes “The Manifestor Prophecy” such a joyful read is the way legends of American history come to life in its speculative world.

“Sesame Street” is ramping up its focus on autism with a collection of new resources and additional efforts at its theme parks. Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind the venerable television show, unveiled videos, a storybook and printable activity guides this week featuring Julia, a 4-year-old Muppet with autism. The online content is part of “Sesame Street and Autism: See Amazing in All Children,” an initiative that began in 2015 to support families of those with autism and raise public awareness of the developmental disability.

While many schools already used digital tools in their teaching of reading prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, extended periods of remote or hybrid schooling certainly quickened the pace and appetite for technology. As this hybrid learning experience involving books and screens becomes more commonplace, it’s important for educators to understand the strengths of each format, particularly around reading and understanding content. Here are examples that show the strengths and weaknesses of print and digital experiences for four reading instruction priorities.

As more state legislatures seek to pass “science of reading” legislation this session, some teachers’ unions are mounting opposition—citing concerns about mandates that would limit teachers’ professional autonomy in the classroom and what they argue are unreasonable implementation timelines. Many of these bills propose a wholesale restructuring of how reading is taught, mandating new training for teachers, prescribing lists of curriculum materials, and banning teaching methods that aren’t backed by research. In pushing back against the proposals, the teachers’ unions are trying to walk a fine political line: affirming the need for strong instruction, while defending teachers’ professional autonomy to use the methods they think work best.

In M.T. Anderson’s new novel, “Elf Dog & Owl Head,” is a kind of inverted Narnia story: Instead of children stumbling on a portal to a magical world, a scrappy dog scampers out of a magical world and into our own. The dog is Elphinore, one of the royal hunting hounds of the People Under the Mountain, a rather chilly, unfeeling band of subterranean elves.

Building strong social and emotional learning skills can help set the stage for students to become better readers. This article outlines five SEL competencies related to reading, and suggestions for strengthening SEL skills in reading instruction.

If you attended kindergarten prior to the mid-1990s you may recall lots of play, singing, and graham crackers. Over the years, there has been a shift as kindergarten has become more structured and academic, with limited play and outdoor time. Research has shown that children learn best when they are engaged in developmentally appropriate experiences and activities: play! A developmentally appropriate kindergarten environment can support children socially and emotionally and foster positive relationships with peers and adults.

April is National Arab American Heritage Month. We now live in an education climate that is working on creating a more culturally responsive curriculum to honor the stories and histories of the many communities that made this country what it is today. This should be no different for Arab and Muslim American stories. Here are the ways teachers can best support their Arab and Muslim students through a social studies lens:

Travis here with your annual reminder that April is National Poetry Month. So it’s the perfect time for book spine centos. Give one a try. Or try it with your students/patrons. Here are my tips for creating a book spine cento.

The compelling new 80-minute documentary, “The Right to Read,” exposes the nation’s literacy crisis through the lives of NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, rookie first-grade teacher Sabrina Causey, and the many Oakland children they engage as they teach them to read, and also families across the country. The documentary vividly puts a human face on the grim statistic that only a third of American fourth-graders can read well enough to qualify as proficient on the 2022 NAEP exam, known as the nation’s report card.

Opportunities to use poetry to develop students’ literacy skills can pop up across the curriculum all year long. I hope that sprinkling poetry throughout the year in smaller bites helps students experience an essential literary art form without detracting from the set curriculum, and in turn strengthens the argument that poetry takes on a more substantial role in the curriculum and in students’ lives. Here are some examples from my recent teaching, along with some ideas for the coming months.

Several years ago, officials at Pathways, an Alabama-based nonprofit that provides services and shelter for women and children who are homeless, learned that their clients needed more than a safe, temporary home: They needed child care, too. In November 2021, the Pathways Early Learning Center opened in the organization’s shelter in Birmingham, with the goal of providing immediate, stable and free child care to families experiencing homelessness.

Transitioning from a three-wheeler to a two-wheeler is both terrifying and thrilling (for kids and their grownups). Here are 16 picture books that will help children look forward to the experience.

Ohio’s teachers unions are pushing back against Gov. Mike DeWine’s attempt to make phonics-based “science of reading” methods the only way to teach reading in Ohio’s schools — but DeWine and state education officials are holding their ground. The presidents of both the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Federation of Teachers praised DeWine for making literacy a priority in a new state budget bill. But both object to DeWine’s attempt in that same bill to make Ohio one of the first states to ban teachers using “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — in reading lessons. That strategy is a large part of long-used teaching approaches like whole language or balanced literacy.

Jason Reynolds is the recipient of the 2023 Margaret A. Edwards Award for his books When I Was the Greatest, The Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys, Ghost, and Long Way Down. School Library Journal is excited to invite their readers to submit questions to Reynolds, a selection of which he will answer in a live Instagram event on March 30 at 3:00 pm ET and SLJ’s June 2023 issue. Ask about his books, the award, or anything else you’ve always wanted to know!

In a Texas A&M Collaborative webinar, educator Kimberly Parker shared strategies for how teachers can embrace students’ multifaceted reading lives and help them build positive relationships with reading. Texts should vary in difficulty and length, Parker said, pulling from work by literacy researcher Tim Shanahan. Independent reading during the school day gives students an opportunity to strengthen their reading skills with minimal pressure. Parker encourages teachers and parents to work with kids and not against them when it comes to choosing reading materials. “Text should be broadly viewed to include print, digital and visual media,” she said.